“Whoever was born in the country like me and spent their childhood there will always hold impressions and images of fields and livestock in their memory.”

Carlo Carrà’s artistic career was initially interwoven with the avantgarde movements of the early 20th century, including Futurism and Metaphysical painting, as well as contributions of a critical and theoretical nature to the magazine Valori Plastici. In the early 1920s he took an independent road. As he wrote in La mia vita: “1922. This date marks my firm decision to have no more to do with others and to be only myself.”¹ His new approach was based on the observation of nature, opening up to contact with real, ordinary things so as to arrive at their essence through the intellect, in other words, geometric idealisation in artistic forms. Filtered through the study of Cézanne, this contemplation of the natural world became more intense halfway through the decade and especially in the period of great activity between 1927 and 1930 that also saw his participation in the 1928 Venice Biennale. The works of the period² include seascapes, riverside views (La foce del Cinquale [The Mouth of River Cinquale], 1928) and landscapes with huts, farmhouses and barnyards interspersed with paintings of figures (Cacciatore toscano [Tuscan Hunter], 1929) and still lives. In Campagna toscana (Tuscan Landscape), as in other contemporary works, the scene is constructed around a haystack and large farmhouse while the expanse of the foreground is developed through a sparkling palette of light, glowing colours. While the haystack occupies a dominant position on the left (as in the Pagliai [Haystacks] of 1929 and 1930), on the right a bold strip of colour surrounded by vegetation and a smaller building create an ambiguous overlapping of space. The rural subject draws upon childhood memories (“Whoever was born in the country like me and spent their childhood there will always hold impressions and images of fields and livestock in their memory.”³) but the countryside portrayed is that of Versilia, where the painter spent the summers at his house in Forte dei Marmi as from 1926. As his son Massimo Carrà tells us,⁴ it was there that he produced sketches that were then developed in paintings during the winter in Milan from memory so as to attenuate the emotion aroused by the immediacy of sight: “A fundamental principle of my work was to encapsulate the feelings aroused in my mind by contemplation of the countryside […]. Nature was […] regarded by me as generating pictorial relations […]. While my aspirations were thus oriented towards realism, I certainly did not abandon the idea that painting is a mental activity, as Leonardo described it. […] In this way, execution is thus also subjected to the constructive rationale, which harmonises in turn with sensations that find light and propriety in an artistic arrangement that I see as the supreme goal of my work.”⁵

Francesco Federico Cerruti purchased the work in May 1969 from the Galleria La Bussola in Turin, which had just bought it from a private collection in Cincinnati. The exhibition Omaggio a Carrà, held a few months later (November 1969) in Turin at the Galleria Gissi, bears witness to the interest in the artist three years after his death. Two stamps on the stretcher attest to the work’s time at the Galleria Il Milione on Via Sant’Andrea in Milan between 1949 and 1951. In 1970 Campagna toscana was added as number 17/29⁶ to the general catalogue of Carrà’s paintings published in three volumes between 1967 and 1968.⁷ In 1977, as indicated by the transport label on the back, it was shown in Geneva by Marie-Louise Jeanneret, who also had a gallery in Italy at Boissano and is connected with various other works in the Cerruti Collection, namely Carafe et bol (1916) by Juan Gris, Mast= und Zierfische (1938) by Paul Klee, Paesaggio (1939) by Giorgio Morandi and Passant furtif (1954) by Jean Dubuffet. Cerruti must have been in contact with her during the 1970s, when the Boissano gallery was particularly active, as attested also by the copies of the following catalogues in his library: Vasarely, Geneva, Marie- Louise Jeanneret - Art Moderne, 1974; Andy Warhol 1974-76, Boissano, Centro internazionale di sperimentazioni artistiche Marie-Louise Jeanneret, 1976; Michelangelo Pistoletto, 16 ans à l’intérieur du miroir, Geneva, Marie-Louise Jeanneret - Art Moderne, 1977; and Giorgio Morandi, Geneva, Marie-Louise Jeanneret - Art Moderne, 1977-78. 

Valeria D’Urso

¹ Carrà C. 1981, p. 153.

² See Carrà M., 1967-68, and 1970.

³ Carrà C. 1981, p. 11.

⁴ Carrà M. 1970, p. 85.

⁵ Carrà C. 1981, pp. 204-205.

⁶ Carrà M. 1970, p. 99.

⁷ Id. 1967-68.